6 ms·

I used to care a lot about tabs and pane splitting in the terminal emulator. Then I discovered terminal multiplexers: screen, then tmux. Now I don't want those

I used to care a lot about tabs and pane splitting in the terminal emulator. Then I discovered terminal multiplexers: screen, then tmux. Now I don't want those features in the terminal emulator anymore, as they overlap and even conflict with the terminal multiplexer.

evilduck 14y ago
I still like tabs. I'm often logged into multiple remote machines where, for me, a terminal emulator's tab represents a unique SSH connection and that tab then has tmux running on the remote machine. Otherwise, I'd be running tmux on my local machine, then want to run tmux on a remote machine, and nesting terminal multiplexers is not good.
- jeffcox 14y ago
  I think that's a big differentiator in people's CLI preferences. When I see prompts that don't include $HOSTNAME, and people eschewing tabs for multiplexing in all cases I just assume they rarely manage remote machines.
  - q_revert 14y ago
    perhaps it's not that they don't manage remote machines, just that they do it differently to you.. nested tmux with $HOSTNAME/$IP in the hardstatus make this very easy imo, tells you where you are whilst also allowing you to keep a minimal prompt.. as i find long prompts can be incredibly annoying also, using ^a^a to send commands to the nested tmux isn't so bad.. but to get to the third one down you need to use ^a^a^a^a as you need to send a ^a^a to the second one in.. for the fourth nest you need 8 ^a's, but again, it's a bit like code indentation, if you're 4 tmuxes deep, then there's a good chance you're doing it wrong but still, it's nice to be able to do it if necessary
- keeperofdakeys 14y ago
  As long as you keep a proper frame of reference, you'll be fine (I disable tmux's status bar on nested tmux sessions though). You can use C-a a, or something similar to send a C-a to the nested session, although it can be a little annoying.
- spudlyo 14y ago
  Nesting terminal multiplexers is very good, I do it for exactly the use case you mentioned. Escaping your escape key is easy, with a little practice you won't even realize you're doing it. I have a shell function called 'go' that creates a new screen and labels it, connects to the remote host via SSH, and then recreates or re-attaches to the remote scren as appropriate. My top level screen session currently has 8 remote hosts I'm logged into, each running their own nested screen sessions. My go() function also reads my ~/.ssh/config file to grab all my host aliases so I can tab complete to them. Note, I'm a Perl programmer, and rarely write shell scripts, so this function may be kinda ugly. go() { local OPTIND OPTARG local SCREENCMD="screen -dRR" while getopts "xn" flag; do case "$flag" in x) SCREENCMD="screen -xRR"; shift;; n) SCREENCMD=""; shift;; esac done if [ "$#" == "0" ]; then echo "Need someplace to go." return 1; fi while (( "$#" )); do screen -t $1 ssh -tq $1 $SCREENCMD shift done } _go_show() { local curr opts cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}" opts=$(grep 'Host ' ~/.ssh/config | cut -d' ' -f2) COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "${opts}" ${cur}) ) } complete -F _go_show go
  - bashinator 14y ago
    You should know that the bash-completion package in Debian and kin does tab-expansion of ssh hosts in known_hosts and config. Also handles the --argument switches for just about all common utilities.
- philsnow 14y ago
  Nesting terminal multiplexers is wonderful :) It kind of sucks if you accidentally use a hardstatusline in both the nesting and the nested muxes, and it slightly sucks if you use the same escape key for both/all levels of nesting. I have been using a nested screen setup for ~3 years at home and it's great. My outer screen uses ^Z as its escape key (I ^Z very few commands) and the inner ones use ^O. It works wonderfully, and I never have a problem remembering which screen has what because of the different escape keys. It's sort of like the finger memory that you develop if you use multiple workspaces (esp in a WM that supports tagging windows) and always keep the same things on the same workspaces.
  - maxaf 14y ago
    ^Z looks like a great escape sequence. Never thought of this one. ^O is my current favorite, and ^\ isn't far behind.
    - spudlyo 14y ago
      I use job control pretty often, so ^Z is out for me. I use ^O as my screen escape key, which back in the way old days used to flush output, which was extremely handy at 300 baud.
      - maxaf 14y ago
        Me, I tend to leak tmux sessions and windows all over the place. It's almost like job control but with a modern twist.
    - bashinator 14y ago
      I like ^J myself. Left pinky, right index finger.
RegEx 14y ago
I like using both. Sometimes a screen tab just isn't enough separation.
bierko 14y ago
For me, tabs distract from the cleanliness of a black (or insert your own background color) terminal.
- spolu 14y ago
  Fullscreen is important!
haraldk 14y ago
Guys, why don't you just go ahead and get yourself a tiling window manager?? http://awesome.naquadah.org/ http://awesome.naquadah.org/
- platz 14y ago
  Or perahps I3! http://i3wm.org/ http://i3wm.org/
  - kostya-kow 14y ago
    Or even better, XMonad! http://xmonad.org/ http://xmonad.org/
    - pekk 14y ago
      Only better if you are up for 500mb of dependencies and having to learn Haskell to configure your desktop.
      - nitheshm 14y ago
        Configuring XMonad is a very good reason to learn Haskell, among many others.
        wink 14y ago
        And apart from a little arcane syntax, you absolutely don't have to learn any real Haskell to configure xmonad.
        nedludd 14y ago
        No, but you have to learn a REALLY arcane syntax!
    - Goranek 14y ago
      or better use DWM :P
onedognight 14y ago
Terminal multiplexers (screen/tmux/dtach) and native terminal emulators each provide unique features, so for me the best is a combination of both! If you use a mac, I encourage you to try iTerm2/tmux-git. The combination allows you to reconnect to a remote tmux session and get a window with all of your tabs for that server. You'll never need to know the tmux commands again. You'll just use your native commands to switch tabs, search the history, see the list of open tabs, open new tabs, etc. This is the killer setup.
nachteilig 14y ago
Somehow I wasn't previously familiar with tmux, and that looks _fantastic_. I've been stacking screen sessions for years, so this is really exciting. Thanks!
columbo 14y ago
I use tmux daily but I still rely on emulator tabs when tailing verbose files as sending it through tmux will lock up my terminal.
CJefferson 14y ago
Personally, I really like to be able to drag the splits between terminals, use my scroll wheel, and click between tabs. Maybe these things can be enabled in tmux somehow? I know on a mac tmux/iTerm can do these things, but I'm on linux.
- RobSis 14y ago
  setw -g mode-mouse on setw -g mouse-select-window on setw -g mouse-select-pane on setw -g mouse-resize-pane on
  - CJefferson 14y ago
    Thanks. On a random note, why do all unix applications (generalising I know) seem to default to a super-minimal set of options? Surely the kind of people who get annoyed by mouse integration (and you can just ignore it) are the kind of people who can find out how to turn it on, whereas those of us who are using tmux for the first time want all the nice options turned on by default?
    - natermer 14y ago
      because people want to be able to use whatever terminal program with the terminal of their choice, even if their choices are wrong and/or insane. Although thank goodness for HN. Now I am aware of tmux mouse-mode and this makes things glorious. Now I just need to figure out a slick way to take the tmux selection and connect it to X's primary clipboard and I will be happy.
  - moe 14y ago
    Sadly this still leaves you with a rather crippled subset of the real thing. I.e. "copy mode" instead of proper scrolling, no native text selection, and very noticeable latency and glitches. It's the price you pay for emulating a 35 years old piece of hardware[1] inside an emulator of the same... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100
    - 14y ago
antihero 14y ago
Personally I've moved from tmux to a tiling window manager with urxvtd. Less fiddly day-to-day and doesn't get locked up and horrible. Tabbing and whatnot are something the WM (in my case, i3) handle far better than a specific program.
- banachtarski 14y ago
  Agreed. Multiplexing panes and tabs should be the responsibility of the WM, not the terminal itself.
  - Goranek 14y ago
    not when you're working via ssh
- philsnow 14y ago
  I gave up on urxvtcd when I realized that a single crash brings down all your terminals. Nowadays I use stock xterm, since while I was dallying with urxvt, xterm got the one feature I cared about from urxvt, which was URGENT-on-bell.
  - antihero 14y ago
    I'm not sure how to port color/font config from my urxvt config to xterm. Googling only seems to tell me to how to change background/foreground, not the individual colours. Also, Is there any reason not to use just urxvt (without the client/daemon setup)? I've never had a crash that has brought down all of my clients, however.
    - codygman 14y ago
      There is no reason not to use urxvt in the normal mode, as it behaves just like xterm would (not exactly of course, but one crashing won't lose all of them).
    - philsnow 14y ago
      no, no reason not to use plain urxvt without the client/daemon bit. at the time, I think I was on some kind of network where urxvt's terminfo wasn't likely to be installed anywhere. I know I could install it everywhere in ~/.terminfo or whatever, but it was a pain to get to a new host and realize that I hadn't set it up. I went back to xterm.
Aissen 14y ago
The nice thing is that Terminology allows you to support any use case you want: - Multi-plexing in the terminal - screen/tmux - multi-plexing in the WM And it's pretty nice ! Written by hackers, for hackers.

evilduck 14y ago

I still like tabs. I'm often logged into multiple remote machines where, for me, a terminal emulator's tab represents a unique SSH connection and that tab then has tmux running on the remote machine. Otherwise, I'd be running tmux on my local machine, then want to run tmux on a remote machine, and nesting terminal multiplexers is not good.

jeffcox 14y ago
I think that's a big differentiator in people's CLI preferences. When I see prompts that don't include $HOSTNAME, and people eschewing tabs for multiplexing in all cases I just assume they rarely manage remote machines.
- q_revert 14y ago
  perhaps it's not that they don't manage remote machines, just that they do it differently to you.. nested tmux with $HOSTNAME/$IP in the hardstatus make this very easy imo, tells you where you are whilst also allowing you to keep a minimal prompt.. as i find long prompts can be incredibly annoying also, using ^a^a to send commands to the nested tmux isn't so bad.. but to get to the third one down you need to use ^a^a^a^a as you need to send a ^a^a to the second one in.. for the fourth nest you need 8 ^a's, but again, it's a bit like code indentation, if you're 4 tmuxes deep, then there's a good chance you're doing it wrong but still, it's nice to be able to do it if necessary
keeperofdakeys 14y ago
As long as you keep a proper frame of reference, you'll be fine (I disable tmux's status bar on nested tmux sessions though). You can use C-a a, or something similar to send a C-a to the nested session, although it can be a little annoying.
spudlyo 14y ago
Nesting terminal multiplexers is very good, I do it for exactly the use case you mentioned. Escaping your escape key is easy, with a little practice you won't even realize you're doing it. I have a shell function called 'go' that creates a new screen and labels it, connects to the remote host via SSH, and then recreates or re-attaches to the remote scren as appropriate. My top level screen session currently has 8 remote hosts I'm logged into, each running their own nested screen sessions. My go() function also reads my ~/.ssh/config file to grab all my host aliases so I can tab complete to them. Note, I'm a Perl programmer, and rarely write shell scripts, so this function may be kinda ugly. go() { local OPTIND OPTARG local SCREENCMD="screen -dRR" while getopts "xn" flag; do case "$flag" in x) SCREENCMD="screen -xRR"; shift;; n) SCREENCMD=""; shift;; esac done if [ "$#" == "0" ]; then echo "Need someplace to go." return 1; fi while (( "$#" )); do screen -t $1 ssh -tq $1 $SCREENCMD shift done } _go_show() { local curr opts cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}" opts=$(grep 'Host ' ~/.ssh/config | cut -d' ' -f2) COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "${opts}" ${cur}) ) } complete -F _go_show go
- bashinator 14y ago
  You should know that the bash-completion package in Debian and kin does tab-expansion of ssh hosts in known_hosts and config. Also handles the --argument switches for just about all common utilities.
philsnow 14y ago
Nesting terminal multiplexers is wonderful :) It kind of sucks if you accidentally use a hardstatusline in both the nesting and the nested muxes, and it slightly sucks if you use the same escape key for both/all levels of nesting. I have been using a nested screen setup for ~3 years at home and it's great. My outer screen uses ^Z as its escape key (I ^Z very few commands) and the inner ones use ^O. It works wonderfully, and I never have a problem remembering which screen has what because of the different escape keys. It's sort of like the finger memory that you develop if you use multiple workspaces (esp in a WM that supports tagging windows) and always keep the same things on the same workspaces.
- maxaf 14y ago
  ^Z looks like a great escape sequence. Never thought of this one. ^O is my current favorite, and ^\ isn't far behind.
  - spudlyo 14y ago
    I use job control pretty often, so ^Z is out for me. I use ^O as my screen escape key, which back in the way old days used to flush output, which was extremely handy at 300 baud.
    - maxaf 14y ago
      Me, I tend to leak tmux sessions and windows all over the place. It's almost like job control but with a modern twist.
  - bashinator 14y ago
    I like ^J myself. Left pinky, right index finger.

RegEx 14y ago

I like using both. Sometimes a screen tab just isn't enough separation.

bierko 14y ago

For me, tabs distract from the cleanliness of a black (or insert your own background color) terminal.

spolu 14y ago
Fullscreen is important!

haraldk 14y ago

Guys, why don't you just go ahead and get yourself a tiling window manager?? http://awesome.naquadah.org/ http://awesome.naquadah.org/

platz 14y ago
Or perahps I3! http://i3wm.org/ http://i3wm.org/
- kostya-kow 14y ago
  Or even better, XMonad! http://xmonad.org/ http://xmonad.org/
  - pekk 14y ago
    Only better if you are up for 500mb of dependencies and having to learn Haskell to configure your desktop.
    - nitheshm 14y ago
      Configuring XMonad is a very good reason to learn Haskell, among many others.
      - wink 14y ago
        And apart from a little arcane syntax, you absolutely don't have to learn any real Haskell to configure xmonad.
        nedludd 14y ago
        No, but you have to learn a REALLY arcane syntax!
  - Goranek 14y ago
    or better use DWM :P

onedognight 14y ago

Terminal multiplexers (screen/tmux/dtach) and native terminal emulators each provide unique features, so for me the best is a combination of both! If you use a mac, I encourage you to try iTerm2/tmux-git. The combination allows you to reconnect to a remote tmux session and get a window with all of your tabs for that server. You'll never need to know the tmux commands again. You'll just use your native commands to switch tabs, search the history, see the list of open tabs, open new tabs, etc. This is the killer setup.

nachteilig 14y ago

Somehow I wasn't previously familiar with tmux, and that looks _fantastic_. I've been stacking screen sessions for years, so this is really exciting. Thanks!

columbo 14y ago

I use tmux daily but I still rely on emulator tabs when tailing verbose files as sending it through tmux will lock up my terminal.

CJefferson 14y ago

Personally, I really like to be able to drag the splits between terminals, use my scroll wheel, and click between tabs. Maybe these things can be enabled in tmux somehow? I know on a mac tmux/iTerm can do these things, but I'm on linux.

RobSis 14y ago
setw -g mode-mouse on setw -g mouse-select-window on setw -g mouse-select-pane on setw -g mouse-resize-pane on
- CJefferson 14y ago
  Thanks. On a random note, why do all unix applications (generalising I know) seem to default to a super-minimal set of options? Surely the kind of people who get annoyed by mouse integration (and you can just ignore it) are the kind of people who can find out how to turn it on, whereas those of us who are using tmux for the first time want all the nice options turned on by default?
  - natermer 14y ago
    because people want to be able to use whatever terminal program with the terminal of their choice, even if their choices are wrong and/or insane. Although thank goodness for HN. Now I am aware of tmux mouse-mode and this makes things glorious. Now I just need to figure out a slick way to take the tmux selection and connect it to X's primary clipboard and I will be happy.
- moe 14y ago
  Sadly this still leaves you with a rather crippled subset of the real thing. I.e. "copy mode" instead of proper scrolling, no native text selection, and very noticeable latency and glitches. It's the price you pay for emulating a 35 years old piece of hardware[1] inside an emulator of the same... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100
  - 14y ago

antihero 14y ago

Personally I've moved from tmux to a tiling window manager with urxvtd. Less fiddly day-to-day and doesn't get locked up and horrible. Tabbing and whatnot are something the WM (in my case, i3) handle far better than a specific program.

banachtarski 14y ago
Agreed. Multiplexing panes and tabs should be the responsibility of the WM, not the terminal itself.
- Goranek 14y ago
  not when you're working via ssh
philsnow 14y ago
I gave up on urxvtcd when I realized that a single crash brings down all your terminals. Nowadays I use stock xterm, since while I was dallying with urxvt, xterm got the one feature I cared about from urxvt, which was URGENT-on-bell.
- antihero 14y ago
  I'm not sure how to port color/font config from my urxvt config to xterm. Googling only seems to tell me to how to change background/foreground, not the individual colours. Also, Is there any reason not to use just urxvt (without the client/daemon setup)? I've never had a crash that has brought down all of my clients, however.
  - codygman 14y ago
    There is no reason not to use urxvt in the normal mode, as it behaves just like xterm would (not exactly of course, but one crashing won't lose all of them).
  - philsnow 14y ago
    no, no reason not to use plain urxvt without the client/daemon bit. at the time, I think I was on some kind of network where urxvt's terminfo wasn't likely to be installed anywhere. I know I could install it everywhere in ~/.terminfo or whatever, but it was a pain to get to a new host and realize that I hadn't set it up. I went back to xterm.

Aissen 14y ago

The nice thing is that Terminology allows you to support any use case you want: - Multi-plexing in the terminal - screen/tmux - multi-plexing in the WM And it's pretty nice ! Written by hackers, for hackers.